


dog days

by irishais



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 16:58:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18996766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irishais/pseuds/irishais
Summary: The gym really isn't the place for this kind of conversation. Squall, Xu, post-war and coming to terms with it.





	dog days

After the war, Xu is alone. 

Sure, she has a couple of visitors while she’s recuperating in the infirmary, knocked around trying to get a handful of students to safety aboard the  _ Ragnarok _ , but Xu had flown only a handful of times past her initial classes, and contrary to popular belief, it isn’t like riding a bike. Especially not aboard an alien spacecraft suddenly dropped into their hangar like they had any use, or  _ room _ , for it. 

Still, she’d gotten them back to earth more or less in one piece, and if she was the only casualty of that flight, so be it. At least she isn’t dead. 

Kadowaki is her main visitor, but she barely counts, considering she’s too busy pouring artificial cures into her body over a span of nineteen hours, until bones and muscles are knitted back together, and Xu can limp out of there under her own power. 

Sure, she sees other SeeDs around campus, sees cadets in her office on a regular basis for infractions and commendations, spars with her coworkers in the remnants of the gym, because there are so many things to do, yes, but they are still  _ SeeD _ , and with that come certain expectations. 

Training is part of rehabilitation, isn’t it? Training is the whole reason they aren’t all wiped off the face of the earth, because Commander Leonhart (and  _ there’s  _ a title that rolls around in her brain with all the appeal of a rotted Malboro tentacle) didn’t manage to fall asleep during his combat 101 classes as a cadet. 

Peace is a tenuous, fragile thing, hard-won, easily shattered. She wonders how many more hours of training he would have needed to circumvent the whole thing to begin with, and if her decision to pass him based on his reaction times during the field exam had been a mistake. 

He never struck her as a career SeeD, too quiet, too willing to follow and not to lead, but of course, ten minutes after getting his rank, he runs off and finds the first girl he can, and drags them all into hell with him. 

_ Stupid _ , selfish,  _ arrogant  _ asshole-- he’s so like Seifer Almasy that Xu wishes she’d passed him instead. At least Almasy had style with his skill, even if every time he opened his mouth, Xu wanted to punch him in his perfect teeth. 

The gym floor is squeaky under her footwork, her taped fists slamming into the punching bag, the chain rattling with every impact, a vibration she feels down to the soles of her sneakers as she dances around it, a slow-spreading pain in her knee perhaps a reminder that she should slow down, ease up. 

_ That’s the kind of thinking that gets you killed, Chang.  _

What was the  _ point _ ? Hundreds, thousands of people dead, and for what? To fight a sorceress that should have never been Garden’s problem in the first place? She had thought they had moved away from that, once she and Headmaster Kramer had loaded his wife onto the White SeeD ship with that Loire girl and set them sail. 

They should have been  _ done  _ with witches. Or she should have gone with Edea after all, and put a bullet between her eyes the second the woman turned on them all. She has the reports from the boat. She knows what happened. 

The bag trembles under her assault. Xu doesn’t stop even as the burn of lactic acid in her muscles starts to spread, a furious ache.

Keep going. Don’t stop. 

Hundreds of kids, dead. A death toll Dr. Kadowaki couldn’t even put a cap on yet, because they were still pulling bodies in Balamb blue from all the battle sites across the world. For  _ what _ ?  _ Time Compression _ ? Something that sounded as fictional as knights and sorceresses, a bedtime story soaked with blood.

She imagines the bag is Leonhart’s face, just for dragging them all off on this harebrained adventure because of some power vested in him by the only man Xu has ever looked up to; clearly, her imagination races ahead of her, because the hallucination of Squall Leonhart starts talking to her, like he’s holding the bag in place while she beats it into submission.

Goddammit, she’s not going crazy; he really has snuck up on her like the cat he wants to be so badly. She’s going to need to implant a bell under his skin right by his tracker the first chance she gets-- Kramer still likes her enough, at least, that he’d give consideration to her offer, and even if he doesn’t, she outranks Kadowaki by a fair margin.

“Hey. Easy. You’re going to end up right back in the infirmary.” God, he almost sounds like he  _ cares _ what happens to her-- where was that when Cid shoved the job that should have been hers right into his lap like a shiny bauble?

Who is she kidding? They’re  _ SeeD _ . They do not pass up promotions because of how it might affect someone’s feelings-- if Kramer had asked her to slit Squall’s throat to get the job, she would’ve shaken the headmaster’s hand with the boy’s blood sticky in her palm.

Xu moves, shifting the center of her attack, and hits the bag with enough force to shove Leonhart back a half-step. Good.

“So? I’ll be put back together by some paramagic, and right back in the field within forty-eight hours, right? I’m sure if you scrounged up a few more of your friends and picked a fight with Rinoa, we could have a third war by dinner.”

“Xu, that’s not fair.”

“A lot of things aren’t fair, are they?”

Again, again, again. Her assault is relentless.

His sigh comes out his nose, a sound that pisses her off with how tired he sounds. They’re  _ all  _ tired. Suck it up, swallow a caffeine pill. There’s work to be done.

“Look, can you just-- stop? For a second? I need to talk to you.”

“I’m listening.” She is not stopping, however. He wanted to volunteer himself to be her personal punching bag, he gets to see the job through to the end. If she stops, she’s going to have to quit-- Xu is not a quitter.  

“I told the headmaster I don’t want the command job anymore.”

_ That _ gets her attention. Xu pauses, looking around the bag to find his face. “What the hell are you talking about? You can’t just quit.”

“Actually, yeah, I can. It’s in the regs-- and it turns out he didn’t file the paperwork for the promotion, so I can appeal to the council if I need to. It’s a battlefield command, nothing more.”

She punches the bag again, coming dangerously close to the hit sliding an inch to the right and ending up in his shoulder instead. “So... what? Are you quitting Garden, too? Running off with your new girlfriend back to Timber?”

“I don’t know. She’s safer here, at least until things die down-- but that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I need to get her trained-- put her in a class with Quistis or someone, someone who can teach her how to control her magic, at least until Edea is back on her feet.”

“That could take months.”

He shrugs. “I know. There’s a lot to do.”

She can’t do another round; Xu stops, shaking out her hands and moving toward the bench, where her water bottle and a towel wait. She uses the latter to mop the sweat off her face, the former to pour half its contents down her throat. It’s tepid from sitting so long-- she could have sworn she had put ice in there before coming down to the gym.

“And you wanted to talk to me about, what, exactly? Because it sounds like you’ve got this pretty well in hand.”

Squall trails her to the bench, and she realizes he’s not dressed for the gym at all, in loose dark dress pants and a button down shirt that smacks of being half a suit. She wonders, idly, where the jacket and tie are, and how long he had sat down with Headmaster Kramer  _ for  _ before coming down here.

He still carries his weight weirdly, though, shifting from one leg to another as he looks at her.

“I need your permission to have a non-SeeD resident living in the dorms.”

Xu snorts, and takes another swig of water. “Why? I’m not the commander.”

His hand outstretches. In it, a blue-leather wallet, slim and  _ screaming _ official SeeD ID. She stares at it for a long second, but ultimately reaches, taking it from him to flip it open. Her official service photo, stern-faced and in full dress uniform, hair back in a bun so tight it takes five years off her face.

It looks exactly like the one currently in her desk drawer in her dorm.

“I don’t understand. What is--" 

"Left side."  

"What-- oh .”  _ There’s  _ the difference, the reason for the reissue. The gold bar that stripes down the left edge of the badge, the deletion of  _ Lieutenant  _ from her title and  _ Commander  _ put in its place.

Xu can’t speak for a long moment, and when she looks up again, he’s gone, only the echo of dress shoes tapping against the linoleum the ghost of his presence at all.

She is alone again.


End file.
